Starting an area for gripes about the book...

It ended! Dammit!

(Quoting GMZoe's spoilertext from another thread):

quote:

The change of tone near the end, on reflection as it didn't occur to me at the time, is a mix of an Anansi Tale and a Tiger Tale. As it appears that Tiger has the upper hand, the story most definately changes into a Tiger tale, and the tone follows that lead.

Nicely observed. I hadn't thought of that, but you're on to something hear, I'll wager.

But is that a criticism? I thought it was nicely done -- subtle and appropriate.

i can't think of a single one except it ended tooooo soon.

quote:

Originally posted by Maure:
But is that a criticism? I thought it was nicely done -- subtle and appropriate.

Well, this is growing out of a conversation in the non-spoiler area which started with a criticism here

Drat, I thought that this was going to be for literary criticism on Anansi Boys.

quote:

Originally posted by Dweller in Darkness:
(Quoting GMZoe's spoilertext from another thread):

quote:

The change of tone near the end, on reflection as it didn't occur to me at the time, is a mix of an Anansi Tale and a Tiger Tale. As it appears that Tiger has the upper hand, the story most definately changes into a Tiger tale, and the tone follows that lead.

Nicely observed. I hadn't thought of that, but you're on to something hear, I'll wager.

That's what I think is going on here. If all stories are Anansi's stories, that includes the book itself. But if Tiger gains back control of the stories, then the story is no longer Anansi's. It's going to become darker and less original, since originality doesn't matter as much as the ideas of strength.

I think I just restated the above remark. ah well.

i really wanted to continue hating spider.
in the middle of the book I really hated him.

but Love for Rosie changes him? i dunno. and same with Charlie not caring anymore? I guess trying to save your life and bloodline and such from destruction and various other weird occurances would change your perspective a tad. but then again, i read the book in two sittings in between economic history so maybe i'm looking for smithian dynamics

quote:

Originally posted by Silly Punk:
i really wanted to continue hating spider.
in the middle of the book I really hated him.

but Love for Rosie changes him? i dunno. and same with Charlie not caring anymore? I guess trying to save your life and bloodline and such from destruction and various other weird occurances would change your perspective a tad. but then again, i read the book in two sittings in between economic history so maybe i'm looking for smithian dynamics

I took the Spider guilt thing a little differently--I figured it was partly the love for Rosie thing, but also partly guilt for perpetrating his tricks against a person he must have instinctively known was once himself.

As for Charlie not caring anymore, I never got the sense that he was madly in love with Rosie--more that she was convenient and he was a Nice Guy...

So, I don't know if anyone has seen this (and I'm admittedly too lazy to search this forum at the moment), but there's a review over at the NY Times of Anansi Boys here (by Charles Taylor). It's not the most favorable review. The author's main gripe is this:

quote:

The problem in "Anansi Boys" is the type of fantasy Gaiman has chosen. The tales of Anansi outwitting his foes leave you feeling you've eaten something heavy and sugary. There's an Uncle Remus folksiness to the stories that sends the airy blitheness of the farce plummeting down to earth.

There is also, I regret to say, the warm hand of instruction lying uneasily on this tale. Charlie works through his ineffectualness and his family issues to find happiness, contentment and - ugh - acceptance. It leaves you with the uncomfortable feeling that for Gaiman, farce by itself would simply have been too frivolous, that he feels the need to impart a lesson. But the improving and the instructive are - and should be - anathema to farce, which is about the sheer bursting joy in a world going crazily to pieces instead of being put tidily right. At one point in "Anansi Boys" Gaiman writes, "Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song." That's why God invented headphones.

I'm not sure that I agree with him--in my mind, a story like this one is a waste if there isn't some kind of resolution, and stories in general mean little to me if the characters don't grow (unless there's a really good reason why they don't).

Anyway, that's my $0.02. Thoughts?

quote:

Originally posted by Circus:
So, I don't know if anyone has seen this (and I'm admittedly too lazy to search this forum at the moment), but there's a review over at the NY Times of Anansi Boys here (by Charles Taylor). It's not the most favorable review. The author's main gripe is this:

quote:

The problem in "Anansi Boys" is the type of fantasy Gaiman has chosen. The tales of Anansi outwitting his foes leave you feeling you've eaten something heavy and sugary. There's an Uncle Remus folksiness to the stories that sends the airy blitheness of the farce plummeting down to earth.

There is also, I regret to say, the warm hand of instruction lying uneasily on this tale. Charlie works through his ineffectualness and his family issues to find happiness, contentment and - ugh - acceptance. It leaves you with the uncomfortable feeling that for Gaiman, farce by itself would simply have been too frivolous, that he feels the need to impart a lesson. But the improving and the instructive are - and should be - anathema to farce, which is about the sheer bursting joy in a world going crazily to pieces instead of being put tidily right. At one point in "Anansi Boys" Gaiman writes, "Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song." That's why God invented headphones.

I'm not sure that I agree with him--in my mind, a story like this one is a waste if there isn't some kind of resolution, and stories in general mean little to me if the characters don't grow (unless there's a really good reason why they don't).

Anyway, that's my $0.02. Thoughts?

I think the fault here lies more with Mr. Taylor than with Gaiman. Taylor wants to pin Anansi Boys down as a farce, because it is funny and has characters in highly improbably situations. This is fantasy, it's going to have highly improbably events. Because he incorrectly characterizes the book, he thinks that the book is bad when it doesn't do what he (mistakenly) assumes it should do.

Now, if you view the book as a traditional comedy (which I did), then that whole "happiness, contentment, and --ugh-- acceptance" bit that Taylor criticizes makes sense as part of the rules of the genre.

My two cents: I love it when critics praise one work of an author while shredding apart another in a review. It's the review equivolent of saying "I love So-and-so, but...". Or in this case attempt to show readers that he does in fact get fantasy.

Yeah, Taylor doesn't seem to be able to reconcile his paragraphs. He talks about the "problems" of Anansi stories (and isn't part of the point of the book that all stories are Anansi stories?)and then talks about the book being "instructive" as if that were a) a bad thing and b) separate from the Anansi nature of the tale.

As for the question of Tiger vs. Anansi tales at the end, the tiger does eat the stoat, but he also tricks the stoat into coming close enough to be eaten. He does this in a simplistic way, but he uses trickery nonetheless. So maybe Tiger learned a lesson as well.

The only gripe i have is that the editor missed obvious typos within the first couple pages of the book. :-/

I really liked Anansi Boys, but had two problems with it:
1. I think he foreshadowed/telegraphed the plot WAY too much. It was fairly obvious that Charlie was going to end up with Daisy from the scene in the bar, to me at least. Annother good example of this is the scene where Gharame Coates doodles Tiger. The story was pretty predictable.
2. Neil has been doing the cliched Dream Sequence with Departed Relation Who Gives Cryptic Advice thing lately. Annother good example of this was in "Monarch of the Glen."
It's a plot device that has always irked me.

Other than that, I think Anansi Boys hit all the right notes, for what it was trying to accomplish. I think Taylor is falling into the review trap of basing the review on what he expected the book to be, rather than what Neil was trying to say.

My criticism for Anansi Boys is that it generally follows the path outlined in a lot of other Neil Gaiman novels, well, at least in Neverwhere and Stardust.

Regular guy living a rather normal life, things are generally good for him, not amazing, but generally pretty good. Something extra-ordinary happens to him and life quickly falls into absolute dissarray. Man is very frustrated and spends the rest of the book picking up the pieces, generally comes to peace with himself by the end of the story, and is just as happier or happier than he was when the story began.
<vague spoilers for Neil Gaiman's other major novels below, do not read if you have not read them>

In Neverwhere, main character has a boring job, boring life, etc but is generally pleased with it.
Something bad happens: Door falls in front of him and he choses to go with her. You feel bad for him when nobody can see him anymore and you really feel sorrow because his life is just shit now.
He picks up the pieces
Finishes the book chosing to take his desired path... Happy.

Stardust:
MAin character is generally leading a happy life.
Goes through the wall ... everything falls apart.
The course of the book is him coming to terms with himself.
Is happier in the end.

American Gods:
Shadow is leading a life that while it wasn't THAT good, it has really gotten a lot better. You feel really happy for him, he's going home from Prison and you don't want anything bad to happen.
Then WHAM it NAILS you with the wife thing and then just gets worse... I guess that American Gods was so much more than just a story about Shadow, which made it such a great book. IT seems like Anansi Boys tries to do the same thing. The Brief Histories written by Mr. Ibis [ninja edit] in AG was excellent and you wanted more of them, it didn't feel cheap. For some reason, the brief interludes of Anansi Stories, written like how one of the women would speak (I forgot which one) just felt like they were immitations of those Histories in AG. Plus, the Histories in AG were relatively pertinant to the story... That's not so much the case for Anansi Boys. The general idea that you get from the stories was something that you knew right from the get-go.

I enjoyed Anansi Boys, I really enjoyed reading it and whipped threw it in a day, turning every page as fast as I could to read what happened next ... but it's one of my least favorite NEil Gaiman books, which is still a good thing though. After reading American Gods, Good Omens, and Neverwhere, I wanted to go back and immediately read them again. I don't have that same feeling with Anansi Boys... I was also *HOPING* for more of a continuation from the AG story, but I knew that wasn't the case.

I also liked the first chapter/excerpt posted on the site than I Did the rest of the book... which wasn't the case for American Gods. I think that Anansi Boys also has a lot to live up to ... American Gods was one of, if not the, best fiction book I've ever read. It's a tough act to follow.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Rebel10,

quote:

Originally posted by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen:
(Quoting GMZoe's spoilertext from another thread):

quote:

The change of tone near the end, on reflection as it didn't occur to me at the time, is a mix of an Anansi Tale and a Tiger Tale. As it appears that Tiger has the upper hand, the story most definately changes into a Tiger tale, and the tone follows that lead.

Nicely observed. I hadn't thought of that, but you're on to something hear, I'll wager.

I guess I was bothered by how well everything wrapped up and how happy everything was at the end. Is that the change of tone that's talked about here? I suppose the whole Tiger Tale/Anansi Tale thing is a good answer, but it kind of seems like you're stretching. I never really considered the book as a whole an Anansi Tale or whatever either, but looking back I guess it could've been. Can anyone else explain why it became waaay too much of a happy ending. Was all that necessary? I'm surprised Fat Charlie's family didn't have a dog that found it's soul mate and had beautiful puppies taboot.

Well, it's also written in the style of the classic comedies. Jeeves and Wooster ALWAYS came out smelling like roses, and by the next story any horribly things that had happened were forgotten. It's sort of similar here, though without Hugh Laurie, which is a shame.

quote:

Originally posted by Skippy:
I guess I was bothered by how well everything wrapped up and how happy everything was at the end. Is that the change of tone that's talked about here?

Nope, was refering to how the humor starts dropping out a bit once Tiger starts having more influence. Wasn't talking about the very end.

and ditto what dweller (er, Fabian) said about comedies. I believe Neil specifically referenced writers like Wodehouse when talking about the style of AB on his blog

quote:

Originally posted by GMZoe:
Nope, was refering to how the humor starts dropping out a bit once Tiger starts having more influence. Wasn't talking about the very end.

Shouldn't that have meant that the first two thirds of the book should have been that happy? I agree that it was comedic, and it got serious when Tiger got involved, but then the end was extreme happines... which is different that comedic in my opinion. And yes the definition of a true greek (classic) comedy should end happily, but what other evidence is there that the book was written in the style of classic comedy? The change just seemed too abrupt (and too much of a change in tone) without any other evidence that it was going to be that way... except maybe that it was just a hokey ending.

the thing about anansi boys is that it isn't any kind of story. it's hard to judge on established terms because the type is "gaiman story" so you have to judge within his own bibliography. as a gaiman story, it shows the same inventiveness, fantasy and consistent (if at times violent) humor. and as for it being a tiger tale and such, it shows in the story-telling that it was almost a tiger story, but became an anansi story, and anansi stories always have ridiculous success for the hero. this accounts for the happiness at the end. and really, charlie is a god and all, so the story is his to do with as he pleases.